I like to listen to a bunch of different music, and sometimes I just surf YouTube for hours, randomly seeing where it will take me. Sometimes I go places I’d rather not have been. And instead of easing my suffering, I’m going to share it with you.

Every Wednesday I’ll try and find something that will make you WTF all the way to the shit-house.

In the spirit of the randomness of my browsing, today’s spotlight is on The Dillinger Escape Plan. They play a musical style of metal called Mathcore, that I define as “rhythmically random.” Wikipedia says it’s “rhythmically complex,” but I don’t see anything complex about playing random notes and pretending you’re still playing music. Well, unless you’re the poor schmuck trying to play along. Then I concede to the complexity.

When someone complains that the metal you listen to is just random noise, you can point them at Dillinger Escape Plan. This can either be used to help your argument by following it up with some good metal, or you can just let them think they’re right so that they stop bothering you.

And look at the people in the crowd in this video. None are head-banging or moshing — they’re just standing around dumbstruck, not knowing what to do because the beat changes every few notes (with a random seed injected so that the signature isn’t changing at predictable intervals).

I think this band’s “music” would be an excellent source of random data for creating secure cryptographic keys, but probably not much else.